Camouflage in the wild

While I am only very slowly scanning slides from the days of yore, another theme that I had back then was animal camouflage.  I would take a pic from further away and then another close enough to see what was going on more clearly.  This worked pretty well with slides in an auditorium, and I gave a number of talks on the subject using my photos.  Put up the first slide and ask the audience to find the animal, then put up the second slide to show it better.  And then talk about the various camouflages used by animals along the way.

I don't think this will work nearly as well on the blog, unless I put the second photos way down the page.  And, looking at photos on a computer gives a whole lot better look than on a screen many feet away in an auditorium, so should be much easier to find things in the first photo.

But I do have a large number of such photos, and will put some on the blog as I get time to scan more.  First up:

A photo from the Dominican Republic of a...

And a photo I think is also from the Dominican Republic. What is going on here?

Many of my slides have written on them the locations involved, people visible, dates, etc.  But sadly, not all of them are detailed enough.  While the first pic is known to be from the Dominican Republic, I didn't note where in the DR the pic was from or the date (so can't go back to my field notes and figure it out).  To identify the animal in the pic, that might be necessary information.

And as for the second photo, I have almost nothing to go on.  Likely, I took a series of photos (slides) of this animal and on one I labeled it completely with date and location, but now this slide is by itself and its close-up twin in my "camouflage" file.  The slide with all the useful data is likely elsewhere in my slide collection, which has some 15,000 slides and is stored in numerous containers.


So enough babble to try and make the close-up photos further down the page.

Or maybe I should tell a joke or wax poetic about something funny.

Nah, just have a look at the close-ups and see if you figured them out.

Yes, it's a frog. Likely in the Genus Eleutherodactylus, but since most DR frogs are brownish, small, and in this genus, pretty hard to get to species without knowing where I took the photo.

The camouflage is likely designed to mimic ground detritus.  It's pretty good at blending in with the moss but a few more recently dead leaves would probably make it disappear as the parched dead leaves aren't even brown anymore.

Yah gotta see it now! A green vine snake (common name as I have no idea of the ID on this snake) after just catching a frog.

Double deal here, with the green snake almost the exact color of the leaves and the frog the same color as the dead leaves.  But snakes are efficient predators, and here the frog lost even with its camouflage.